Article published In:
Cumulative Knowledge Building in Learner Corpus Research
Edited by Tove Larsson and Douglas Biber
[International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 11:1] 2025
► pp. 178–216

The relative influence of language backgrounds, communicative text types, and disciplines in undergraduate student writing

 | Montclair State University
 | Oxford College of Emory University
Previous studies of undergraduate writing investigated linguistic variation across (i) assignment types, (ii) disciplines, and (iii) language backgrounds. The combined findings of these studies allowed us to formulate eight hypotheses as to how undergraduate writing is likely to vary across these three variables. Three of the hypotheses are as follows: (a) writing in humanities will have more features of ‘academic involvement’, while writing in sciences will have more features of ‘information density’; (b) assignments such as proposals and procedural recounts will have more features of ‘expression of possibility’; and (c) L1 students will use more features of ‘information density’ than L2 students. In the current study, we test these hypotheses, examining whether the language of undergraduate writing varies in accordance with the expectations from previous research. We use the dimensions identified in Goulart (2024) to examine these hypotheses in a corpus of undergraduate student writing. The results provide support for hypotheses related to disciplines and communicative purposes, but not for those related to language backgrounds.
Keywords: communicative text type, undergraduate student writing, L1 and L2 writing, discipline-specific writing, corpus linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The linguistic characteristics of undergraduate student writing
    • 2.1Disciplinary variation
    • 2.2Assignment type
    • 2.3Language background
  • 3.Specific hypotheses
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Corpus
    • 4.2Linguistic analyses
    • 4.3Statistical analyses
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Dimension 1: Elaborated discourse versus condensed style
    • 5.2Dimension 2: Production of possibility versus content-focused description
    • 5.3Dimension 3: Informational density vs. involved, academic narrative
  • 6.Summary and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 25 October 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.23028.gou
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